Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is aiming for the moon in Jammu & Kashmir – the Hindu nationalists are pulling out all stops to install a Hindu chief minister in India’s only Muslim-majority province. The man BJP is desperate to anoint is none other than Jitendra Singh, party MP from Udhampur-Doda in the Jammu region. He is the federal Minister of State for Development of North-East and is considered close to Modi and BJP president Amit Shah. The ...

After jolting Prime Minister Narendra Modi with a surprise hug in Parliament, India’s opposition leader Rahul Gandhi called it the “embrace of love” for his political adversary.But, ironically, the hug of love seems to have somehow awakened Congress Party President Gandhi’s killer instincts and steeled his determination to wrest power from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in next year’s general elections.Even as the fall-out of last week’s hug is ...

Indian federal investigators Wednesday charged a politician from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party with raping a teenager whose plight was ignored by police until she tried to set herself alight. The Central Bureau of Investigation charged Kuldeep Singh Sengar with the 2017 rape of a 16-year-old girl, whose father was later beaten in custody allegedly by Sengar’s brother and later died. The sense of impunity enjoyed by Sengar, a powerful Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state lawmaker ...

India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) quit the ruling coalition in Jammu and Kashmir state on Tuesday and called for federal control over the disputed Himalayan region, citing a deterioration in security that could herald a new crackdown. The Hindu nationalist BJP entered into an unlikely alliance with a regional party after an inconclusive election in 2014 to govern the Muslim-majority state, which is claimed by neighboring Pakistan and where Indian forces have struggled to ...

India’s 172 million Muslims are set to celebrate Eid al-Fitr in the face of tease, taunts and torture by Hindu hate-mongers who have been on the prowl in society and on social media ever since Narendra Modi took up the reins of the country in 2014. Even as the 68-year-old prime minister just completed four years in office, two more young Muslims were mercilessly done to death merely on suspicion of cattle theft on June 13 by a band of so-called cow vigilantes in eastern Jharkhand state ...

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party on Saturday walked away from a court-mandated test to prove it had the support of a majority of lawmakers to govern the southern state of Karnataka, after an election a week ago threw up no clear winner. The move could now allow an alliance of the main opposition Congress and a regional party to form the government in the state. Newly elected lawmakers had been due to vote in the assembly on the orders of the Supreme Court, which intervened ...

Exit polls in the southern Indian state of Karnataka on Saturday suggest Narendra Modi’s BJP could emerge as the leading party, potentially boosting the prime minister’s chances of winning a second term in general elections early next year. Both Modi and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that has dominated Indian politics since independence, have campaigned hard in Karnataka, a state of 66 million people with diverse constituencies. While three TV ...

Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), one of India’s central universities and a religious minority institution, has been in the news for all the wrong reasons recently.On 2nd May, a group of right-wing Hindu organizations entered into its campus – accompanied by a few local policemen – and raised slogans against Mohammed Ali Jinnah – the founder of Pakistan.They were demanding the removal of Jinnah’s portrait at the Students’ Union Hall within 48 hours. They also ...

An Indian man, associated with a Hindu right-wing organization, has stirred a row after he turned down a taxi which was being driven by a Muslim. According to a Times of India report, Abhishek Mishra, who is a social media adviser of Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Organization) wrote on his Twitter that he would not travel with a Muslim driver of location-based taxi app Ola. “Cancelled @Olacabs Booking because Driver was Muslim. I don’t want to give my money to Jihadi ...

Survivors of India’s bloody Hindu-Muslim riots in 2002 have still been leading a wretched life, thanks to the lackadaisical attitude of the government in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s wealthy home state of Gujarat. Even 16 years after the country’s worst anti-Muslim pogrom, that left 2,000 people dead and thousands maimed, some 3,500 dirt-poor, displaced families continue to live in sub-human conditions in tumbledown dwellings in surroundings stinking to high heaven in 83 ...